WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
USA. 1998. Director - Vincent Ward, Screenplay - Ron Bass, Based on the Novel by Richard Matheson, Producers - Barnet Bain & Stephen Simon, Photography - Eduardo Serra, Music - Michael Kamen, Visual Effects Supervisor - Ellen M. Somers, Visual Effects - Digital Domain (Supervisor - Kevin Mack) & POP Film and POP Animation (Supervisor - Stuart Robertson), Painted Visual Effects - Mass Illusions (Supervisors - Nicholas Brooks & Joel Hynek), Digital Visual Effects - CIS Hollywood (Supervisor - Dr Ken Jones), Special Effects Supervisor - Roy Arbogast, Makeup Effects - Masters FX Inc (Supervisor - Todd Masters), Production Design - Eugenio Zanetti. Production Company - Interscope Communications/MetaFilmics. Robin Williams (Christy Nielsen), Cuba Gooding Jr (Albert Lewis), Annabella Sciorra (Annie Nielsen), Max Von Sydow (The Tracker), Jessica Brooks Grant (Marie Nielsen), Josh Paddock (Ian Nielsen), Rosalind Chao (Leona)
Plot: Not long after the death of his two children, Christy Nielsen is killed by a colliding car while going to aid a car crash victim. He finds himself in the afterlife which is not any traditional Heaven or Hell but a landscape of one's own imagination - he having composed his out of the classical artworks his wife Annie restored - and where one can inhabit whatever body they choose. But then comes the news that Annie, unable to handle the loss, has committed suicide. Here suicides are not condemned of Hell but a world wrapped in their own self-absorption. Christy ignores all warnings that he will be dragged down into her closed-off world to venture in and save her.
New Zealander Vincent Ward is one of the most fascinating directors at work anywhere in the world at the moment. Ward trained as an artist at Canterbury University (only a few departments away from me) before turning to film- making. As a director he has an artist's fascination with the visual image - one cannot think of any other director in the world who would model the entire look of a film on the work of classical artists. His first feature film ‘Vigil' (1985) is an extraordinarily composed poem written in landscape and light which almost entirely circumvents narrative to work on a level of pure imagery alone. The Cannes-acclaimed ‘The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey' (1988) was a time travel fantasy that Ward painted in the imagery of artists like Bruegel and Bosch that offered a haunting outsider's look in on the alienness of the 20th Century.
Ward lost the plot somewhat with 1992's ‘Map of the Human Heart', an Innuit romance where his fascination with imagery neglected the film's crucial emotional core. And since ‘Map' Ward's output has been erratic - he caught among the revolving door of directors attached to ‘Alien3' and only ending up with story credit and then being forced to direct commercials and take bit parts in films like `Leaving Las Vegas' (1995) and ‘One Night Stand' (1997) in order to stay off the unemployment line.
But ‘What Dreams' is Ward's return to form and his most mainstream release yet. It is an adaption of the 1984 novel by acclaimed genre novelist/screenwriter Richard Matheson, author of the likes of ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man', ‘Duel', most of Roger Corman's Poe films in the 1960s, and numerous ‘Twilight Zone' and ‘Star Trek' episodes, among others. Ward's work on the film is quite extraordinary. He lights the screen up with impossible vistas of the imagination - a vast library where gondoliers drift through canals between the bookshelfs; Williams having to walk across a sea of living faces as he enters Hell; valleys and oceans filled with castles and cities that have been constructed out of works by classical masters amongst which people nonchalantly fly; houses casually sitting amidst the Gothic arches of the roof of an inverted cathedral. In an extraordinary synthesis of artistic vision and cutting edge digital effects technology, Ward gets to literally paint on film. In the most wondrous section Robin Williams steps into a landscape that is a Van Gogh painting come to life, slipping and sliding through the paint of some of the giddiest and brightest oil colours imaginable. The sheer breadth of Ward's vision is astounding.
One of Ward's failings in the past has been a fascination with imagery at the expense of emotional soul. But thanks to a good cast and an especially strong script, he has ample compensation here (apart from Annabella Sciorra whose bland performance makes one wonder what Williams's love is really all about). The film's humanist reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend at the climax is emotionally powerful. A landmark achievement.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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